Opening: October 8, 6 - 9 pm

On Friday, October 8th, 2010 from 6 to 9 p.m., Galerie Michael Janssen will be presenting for the first time Belgian artist Joris Van de Moortel with the exhibition Like a huricane (you are like). Jointly, the gallery will be screening the new film by German artist Julika Rudelius entitled One of Us.

Joris Van de Moortel (*1983) studied at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent, Belgium from which he graduated in 2009. Van de Moortel’s practice and work is a complex web of ideas and references with a processual and performative approach. It combines different disciplines and is characterized by a radical deployment of material in which predicted chance or “planned accidents” play a central role. In his raw sculptures and installations Van de Moortel arranges objects in extreme situations stripping them of their original function. They seem like attempts to capture and accumulate energy and often feel like time bombs that might explode at any moment. He uses building materials, everyday objects and musical instruments or their wooden mock-ups (he is also a musician whose new album has been released in May 2010). He bundles, binds, encases them in wood or Plexiglas cases or hangs them from the ceiling. The work reminds one of stage sets or relics from a performance that took place secretly. Van de Moortel’s sculptural environments depend on found situations and atmospheres and have often no definite beginning, middle or end. After displaying and sometimes during an exhibition, Van de Moortel destroys, burns or runs a bulldozer over the work or just lets it collapse, explode or disintegrate; recycling then the rubble in again new works. “Undoing” becomes part of “doing”. His practice disrupts all expectations of what sculpture can be and plays with notions of referentiality.